1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for analyzing trends in an information aggregate. More particularly, it relates to evaluating information aggregates by visualizing changes in associated categories as a function of time.
2. Background Art
Corporations are flooded with information. The Web is a huge and sometimes confusing source of external information which only adds to the body of information generated internally by a corporation's collaborative infrastructure (e-Mail, Notes databases, QuickPlaces, and so on). With so much information available, it is difficult to determine what's important and what's worth looking at.
Web search engines have been provided with facilities for identifying information on the Web. Amazon.com, for example, categorizes documents, and the categories do appear in search results. For example, a general search on a term like “complexity” returns general categories to be examined. For example, the following message may be returned: “See matches in: Science (137), Professional & Technical (117), Nonfiction (115).”
A sense of what a particular document might be about on Amazon.com may be obtained through its “books in similar categories” facility. For example, similar books may be researched by subject:
Browse for books in:
    Subjects>Science>History & Philosophy>General    Subjects>Science>Mathematics>General    Subjects>Science>Physics>GeneralSearch for books by subject:    Science/Mathematics    Mathematics    Philosophy & Social Aspects    Physics
The Amazon.com example is static, and does not deal with changes over time, or how changes propagate across collections of documents.
The Lotus Discovery Server (LDS) is a Knowledge Management (KM) tool that allows users to more rapidly locate the people and information they need to answer their questions. It categorizes information from many different sources (referred to generally as knowledge repositories) and provides a coherent entry point for a user seeking information. Moreover, as users interact with LDS and the knowledge repositories that it manages, LDS can learn what the users of the system consider important by observing how users interact with knowledge resources. Thus, it becomes easier for users to quickly locate relevant information.
Several approaches are known to the art for analyzing keywords in a set of documents to create clusters of related documents, or to classify documents into existing clusters. However, such approaches do not deal with changes over time, or propagation of categories through conceptual or physical space.
It is an object of the invention to provide an improved system and method for evaluating information aggregates.